Spanish
1826-1898
Carlos de Haes Galleries
Spanish painter of Belgian birth. In 1835 he moved with his parents to M?laga, where he studied under the court portrait painter and miniature painter Luis de la Cruz y R?os (1776-1853). In 1850 he returned to Belgium and studied with the landscape painter Joseph Quineaux (1822-95). During his studies there and on his travels in France, Germany and Holland, he became acquainted with contemporary Realist trends. He returned to Spain in 1855, becoming a naturalized Spaniard, and the following year he exhibited numerous landscapes at the Exposici?n Nacional, Madrid, to much acclaim. In 1857 he won the competition for the fourth chair of landscape painting at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Madrid with View of the Royal Palace from the Casa de Campo (1857; Madrid, Real Acad. S Fernando), a work showing characteristics of the Barbizon and Fontainebleau landscape schools. In 1860 he was elected Acad?mico de m?rito at the Real Academia de S Fernando in Madrid. By 1861 he was officiating and drawing up the regulations for the landscape competitions for aspiring pensionnaires. Consequently plein-air works came to be required in place of the previous tradition of submitting historical landscapes executed in the studio, a practice that discouraged the study of nature. De Haes suggested that only final corrections should be made in the studio, an attitude that indicates his timid initiation and acceptance of Realist trends. Related Paintings of Carlos de Haes :. | The Peaks of Europe, The Mancorbo Canal | Bajamar | Tileworks in the Principe Pio Mountains | Bajamar | Praderas | Related Artists:
Baron Antoine-Jean Gros1771-1835
French
Baron Antoine-Jean Gros Galleries
The son of a painter, Antoine Jean Gros was born in Paris on March 16, 1771. At the age of 14 he entered the studio of Jacques Louis David, the acknowledged leader of the classical revival. Although his own work became radically different from David's, he maintained a lifelong respect for his teacher and envisioned himself as the upholder of the Davidian tradition.
In 1787 Gros entered the Acad??mie de Peinture, and when the Acad??mie dissolved in 1793 (a result of the French Revolution) he went to Italy. He met Josephine Bonaparte in Genoa in 1796, and she introduced him to Napoleonic society. Gros entered Napoleon's immediate entourage and accompanied him on several north Italian campaigns. Gros also became involved with Napoleon's program of confiscating Italian art for removal to France.
Gros returned to Paris in 1800 and began to show his Napoleonic paintings in the annual Salons. The most famous of these are the Pesthouse at Jaffa (1804) and Napoleon at Eylau (1808). These works served to deify Napoleon, showing him engaged in acts of heroism and mercy. Stylistically, the paintings were revolutionary:their exotic settings, rich color, agitated space, and general penchant for showing the gruesome specifics of war and suffering differed radically from the cool generalizations of Davidian classicism that Gros had learned as a student. The presentation of contemporary historical events was also new, a harbinger of the realism that developed steadily during the first half of the 19th century in French, American, and English painting. Finally, the emphatic emotionalism of Gros's art established the foundation of romantic painting that Th??odore G??ricault and Eug??ne Delacroix developed after him.
Unlike that of some of his countrymen (David is a case in point), Gros's position did not suffer after the fall of Napoleon. Gros painted for the restored monarchy, for instance, Louis XVIII Leaving the Tuileries (1817), and he decorated the dome of the Panth??on in Paris with scenes of French history (1814-1824). For this Charles X made him a baron in 1824. But these works lack the zest and commitment of Gros's Napoleonic period, perhaps because they were not based on the immediate kinds of historical experiences that had inspired the earlier paintings.
Although marked by considerable public success, Gros's later career was in many ways acutely troubled. Basically, he could not resolve his personal esthetic theories with his own painting or with the work of his younger contemporaries. To the end Gros wished to propagate the classicism of David, and he took over David's studio when the master was exiled in 1816. By the 1820s, however, the revolutionary romanticism of G??ricault and Delacroix, among others, had clearly begun to eclipse classicism, and Gros found himself fighting a lonely and losing battle for conservatism. Ironically, he was fighting a trend that his own best work had helped to originate. As he persisted, moreover, his own painting began to show a diffident mixture of classic and romantic attitudes. Thus, while he was inherently a romantic, he tragically came to doubt himself. Gros died on June 26, 1835, apparently a suicide.
AlexanderFlemish painter (1587-1661)
Vasily Kandinskyb. Dec. 4 ,Dec. 16, New Style, 1866, Moscow, Russia--d. Dec. 13, 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Fr.
Wasilly Kandinsky (or Vassilii Kandinskii) was a Russian painter whose works from 1910 are considered the first abstract paintings. Kandinsky had a law career in Moscow until he opted for art school in Munich in 1896 -- when he was almost 30. Within a decade he'd made a name for himself in Russia and in Europe, an Expressionist whose dazzling watercolors were influenced by Russian folk art and French Impressionists such as Claude Monet. Between 1910 and 1912 he wrote about non-objective "abstract" paintings and published On the Spiritual in Art, a work that solidified his position as the father of abstract art. Known for his ingenuity with geometric shapes and use of brilliant color, Kandinsky was successful in Europe and the United States.